About me... (photos can be found under the text !)

My personal mining-"history":

My interest in mining developped very early in my life, yet. I am living in a  region called Sauerland where different raw materials and minerals have been produced here for centuries and some of them still are. Some examples are slate (Fredeburg, Nuttlar, Willingen), iron ore (Ramsbeck, Meschede), gold (in a small village called Goldhausen (!) close to the Hessian border) and hard coal (in the so called "Sauerland-villages" of the Ruhr area in the region of Froendenberg and Ardey).

When I was a child, it caught my interest to stand in front of a small depression in the woods that has been the former entrance of a tunnel and to imagine as in past times the miners with their lamps and their mine cars entered the tunnel in order to do their hard work underground.

On May 17th in 1994 I had the opportunity to visit Heinrich Robert colliery, today Ost colliery, in Hamm (Germany) for the first time. It was an incredible experience to be -970 metres underground in a hot longwall mining area, to see and feel the miners' working conditions and to reduce the colliery's output by taking a large piece of hard coal with me (today this piece has a special place in my cupboard).

During further visits my interest grew a lot and I developped the opinion, that we have to keep upright a vivid mining industry and not just a few collieries.

Because of that I created PRO-BERGBAU....

My sentence for the mail collection:

"You have to see by heart, the essential is invisible for the eyes !!!!"

(A. de Saint-Exupéry, The small Prince, Paris 1943)

Personal data:

Name: Dr. Daniel Schopphoff

Born: July 2nd in 1975

Contact: mail@pro-bergbau.de ~ ICQ-#: 324954997 ~ ICQ-Status:

Please click on the photos' small versions in order to enlarge them and to get the corresponding background information. ATTENTION: The pictures' explanations can now be found UNDER the large versions.